Mainstream personal assistants like Amazon's Alexa apparently aren't good enough for Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, who has spent part of the last year building his own custom robot butler.
In a post on Facebook on Monday, he shared the preliminary results of his approximately 100 hours of coding: a real-life Jarvis that uses artificial intelligence to do everything from controlling living room lights to entertaining Zuckerberg's baby daughter, Max.
The main advantage of his invention over, say, an Amazon Echo, is that it is always learning new words and concepts that are tailored to his needs and those of his wife, Priscilla Chan.
"It uses several artificial intelligence techniques, including natural language processing, speech recognition, face recognition, and reinforcement learning, written in Python, PHP and Objective C," Zuckerberg wrote, referring to the programming languages he used.
"It started simple by looking for keywords, like 'bedroom, 'lights,' and 'on' to determine I was telling it to turn the lights on in the bedroom," he wrote. "It quickly became clear that it needed to learn synonyms, like that 'family room' and 'living room' mean the same thing in our home. This meant building a way to teach it new words and concepts."
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In the end, Zuckerberg was able to create algorithms that can not only associate similar phrases, like "family room" and "living room," but also distinguish between other linguistic nuances, such as the difference between the name of a song and a request to search for music.
"Saying 'play Someone Like You' means play that specific song," he told Fast Company. "Saying 'play someone like Adele' means asking it to find a recommendation for an artist like Adele and play some of their good songs. Saying 'play some Adele' means go find some of her best songs and make a playlist."
So how well does Zuckerberg's Jarvis work? In a demo, it chose Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" when asked to play something similar to Red Hot Chili Peppers, according to Fast Company. Not bad. But that was after Zuckerberg had to tell the system four times to turn the lights off before it got dark.